BEIJING, Aug. 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese companies are making the most of their IPs by incorporating traditional culture into games, and bringing virtual characters into the real world, China Daily reported Friday.
Take for instance the Cantonese opera "Fighting for the Great Tang Empire." The highly popular production, which has been staged more than a hundred times across China since it was created in 2015, was produced by Xishanju, a game company from Zhuhai, south China's Guangdong Province. The opera is based on the company's flagship game "JX Online," according to the newspaper.
"We think that it is our mission to revive traditional culture so that they will not be relegated to displays in museums. This is part of our understanding and practice of exploring IPs in the Chinese culture," Xishanju's vice-president Gong Daojun was quoted as saying.
Another company that has sought inspiration from traditional Chinese culture is Beijing-based game and movie conglomerate Perfect World, whose action-adventure game "Unruly Heroes" is based on the Chinese classic novel "Journey to the West," which features the well-known character Monkey King.
Xiao Hong, CEO of Perfect World, was quoted as saying that many Chinese industry players are striving to emulate how Hollywood and Disney have managed to achieve success with IPs related to Chinese culture, such as Mulan and Kungfu Panda.
Liu Wei, president of game company Giant Network, also stressed the importance of blending cultural elements into games, noting that only games with a grand outlook on the world and a rich cultural inheritance can hold a long-lasting attraction for users.
China's game industry is one of the largest in the world, the newspaper said, citing a report by Beijing-based research firm CNG that China's gaming market made 214.4 billion yuan (30.4 billion U.S. dollars) in revenues in 2018, up 5.3 percent from the year before.
